ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

DICK STEEL Rampo Noir consists of 4 short stories adapted from the works of novelist Edogawa Rampo, with each segment helmed by a different director. Starring art-house regular Tadanobu Asano as almost different characters spanning across the shorts, this film, to put it mildly, should excite art-house lovers since it stars one of their idols, but everyone else, unless you have spare capacity for the bizarre, would likely want to steer clear of this. For omnibus films, you'd come to expect varying standards and levels of enjoyment, and this film is no different.The first short Mars Canal (Kasei No Unga) directed by Suguru Takeuchi is probably the weirdest of the lot, and the shortest, which consists of dizzying camera work and a non- linera narrative, if there is one anywhere to begin with. Asano stars in his birthday suit as he goes through an intense battle with a girl on a filthy floor, screaming, yelling, kicking, before he finds some peace by dropping himself into a pond of water. You heard me, and it is bewildering. I think if I were to film a toilet scene with a man pooping, that'll make a more interesting subject matter, and I'll throw in sound effects to boot too.Mirror Hell (Kagami Jigoku) is probably the more palatable of the lot. Directed by Akio Jissoji), Asano plays detective Kogoro Akechi, who's called upon when a series of bizarre murders take place, all linking the victims with strange mirrors in their possession when they meet their demise. Their faces get considerably disfigured, though you don't get to see it verbatim save for a stylized sequence of what may look like acid chewing through flesh. It is here that the narrative moots the point, with reflections, about what is real and what is actually through the looking glass, and has very nice sets made up of full length mirrors that I always tend to look closely at to spot the camera crew. But the narrative will fizzle out in the end because it has to comply with art-house sensibilities, and I felt it left everyone hanging midway without a proper resolution.Caterpillar (Imomushi) by Hisayasu Sato plays with the caterpillar/butterfly motif. A war veteran, severely disfigured and without any limbs, is left at the mercies of his sadistic wife (Yukiko Okamoto) to take care of him, and is subject to her horniness and liking for S&M sexual torture. For starters you might think that the wife is nothing short of dutiful, responsible and full of love, having removed all traces of mirrors and reflective surfaces so that he won't feel depressed with how he looked (seriously, if you're in that kind of state, you don't need a mirror to know you're screwed), but there's nothing to protect him from the dangers from within - his own wife. There's probably no proper point to this other than an exercise on cruelty against the disabled, and a measure of how sick one can be in pushing the tolerance envelope.The last short, Crawling Bugs (Mushi), tells of a man's obsession with a woman. Asano returns to star as a different character, this time a limo driver who is infatuated with his client, a beautiful actress (Tamaki Ogawa). This segment got convoluted no thanks to its repetitive and fragmented storyline, which treads once again on reality and perceived reality, what worked to its advantage here is the lush visuals filled with saturated pop colours. You might wonder if director Atsushi Kaneko was schizophrenic in its delivery of this messed up piece, which continues to baffle especially after your energy's sapped by the previous installments to care any more.If there's a running, unifying theme here, then it'll be the idea of reality (as usual with an art-house flick), and this shows in all the inter-titles used throughout the films, which is written in a mirror image. There's more visual style than solid substance here in driving the films, and I think a trip to the bookstore for the translated works of Rampo Noir might help in digesting some of these stories, and whether or not the filmmakers here had gone to extreme lengths in disfiguring the narrative of the source material. Recommended to those with a large bandwidth of attention.

christopher-underwood Lengthy anthology of films made from stories by Edogowa Rampo, that all seem to revolve around obsessive love and the consequences of feeling; 'Since I fell in love with you my life has been hell'. First up, 'Mars Canal' comprises a naked man walking across what appears to be a lunar landscape and recalling a naked fight with a lover (?). Not much in this one for me and 'experimental' would probably be the correct tag. Next up, Mirror Hell was a fairly interesting but rather convoluted tale involving mirrors and ladies dying after a tea ceremony. I liked a lot of this but thought it could have been better told. Caterpillar, I thought was masterful. We are confronted with a mere torso and head of a man who is being further injured and degraded (and whipped) by his wife. She says he has returned injured from war and only she can bear to face him but certainly does not treat him very 'lovingly' as we would conceive of the word. There is a lot here of love and hate, of need and possession and although it is at times very hard to watch I was most impressed. The final, Crawling Bugs, doesn't quite match up to the Sato film but is well shot and certainly well worth watching. All told a surprisingly good quartet and tempts one towards the writings of the mysterious, Mr Rampo.

dchief8000 I thought the movie was... interesting. Some parts a little too artsy. I'm not really here to debate the movie but, to ask about the warning in the beginning. What are the EXACTLY talking about pertaining the "intended effects"? I'm not sure if they're talking about the blockey distorted appearance of a scratched DVD or if its just the one I'm watching. After a few minutes it gave me a little headache. I thought that that was what they were warning about until towards the end when the guy in crawling bugs says, "what was I thinking?" then the movie was "normal". I had rented the movie from Blockbuster and it was brand new and undamaged.

olz_15 I also happened to have seen this at the very same Japanese festival in Sydney, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.These shorts are sick. The writer behind the original stories may have a disturbed and twisted mind for inspiring these disgusting tales of torture and obsession, and love (love which is so alien it doesn't really fit the word).Of course many stories by Edogawa Rampo have been banned already in Japan for that very same reason.However, these shorts were great examples of how dark cinema can get. These push right to the boundaries, where sense, reason, and any sort of real point is left behind in its own madness. And it does try to make points. They draw parallels between conscious and subconscious, reality and delusion. The surreal images and narratives destroy the boundaries between the two and the flow freely into each other. The film challenges what art really is. Whether it's a beautiful reflection, a horrific image, or something that is both beautiful on the outside but dead and corroded inside. Here we see that mirrors have the potential to be god, trapping us in its frame. Love is horrific. Horrific. These shorts have the potential to repel you in disgust, or to draw you in and lose yourself in its insanity, and for that reason alone it is a powerful work of art.The four individual directors obviously had a daunting task ahead of them trying to make this. They had to present these tales honestly, and also visually uncover the madness behind them. I don't know about the former, as I haven't read any of Rampo's stories, however visually these films are amazing too. Especially Mirror Hell, which has amazing shots of the actors constantly reflected in dozens of different mirrors.You leave the film feeling as if the makers had thrown a lot of violence and sex at you stylishly but with no real substance. The shorts are too surreal and disjointed to follow through with any of the points they try to make. The are no answers to be found in these shorts, and nothing profound to learn or re-learn. However, these shorts were never made with such intentions. They were made to show the madness of Edogawa Rampo. They were made to disgust you, and to provoke you. And they mastered that exceptionally.Whether you like it or not, you won't forget this one.